Beach Hut Theatre Company presented this multi-media ‘rock opera’ from the exterior balcony of the Rotunda Museum on the weekend of 26 and 27 September. The show, part of Scarborough Museums Trust’s celebrations of the bi-centenary of the publication of Smith’s ground-breaking geological map, featured projections on the building by Liam Watt Pattison.

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This fun, family orientated musical production featured a core cast of nineteen actors supported by local schoolchildren from Friarage School and a full rock band.

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In 1815, William Smith (1769-1839) published his ‘map that changed the world’. The techniques he developed whilst creating the map, which shows the geological strata of England and Wales, are still the basis for much geological research today. A copy of Smith’s map is on display in the Rotunda Museum.

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He lived in the Scarborough in his later years and was a member of Scarborough Philosophical Society, which opened the Rotunda, one of the world’s first purpose-built museums, in 1829.